Mass Super-Empowering Event

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In Super Hero stories, there are many, many ways to give the lead super powers. However, sometimes it becomes cost efficient in terms of descriptive effort or setting construction to give every character the same super hero/villain origin story in a Mass Super-Empowering Event.

So why do authors use this trope? After all, one valid criticism of this trope is that it takes the "inventiveness" and diversity out of a Super Hero Origin story by repeating it across several characters. Well, it turns out that having fifty ways a Freak Lab Accident can give you super powers got old, fast, forcing quite a few Meta Origins to be applied to tidy up the place. Another is that it frees the author from having to give exposition on the source of the powers to focus on the characters themselves and the way that they use their new powers, effectively giving more Character Development and characterization by showing how they react to getting great power — be it betrayal, smugness or responsibility. Lastly, the cause for The Event can be a major plot hook for the hero(es) to unravel throughout the season.

And of course, due to the nature of the trope, be wary of unmarked spoilers.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

My Hero Academia had such an event in its history, causing most of humanity to develop "quirks" as a result. At the time of the story proper, about four out of every five people have a quirk. However, it's also a Superpower Lottery in that many quirks aren't particularly useful, such as the ability to stretch your eyes out of your head really far. Also, a person can only ever get one quirk, so whatever you get, you're stuck with it.

Darker Than Black fits this rather neatly, having a mysterious event which opened two mystical singularities known as "Heaven's Gate" and "Hell's Gate" — in South America and Tokyo, respectively — resulting in people from around the world being transformed into either Contractors (those with special powers who are stripped of their emotions/morality although, that turns out to be much more complicated) or Dolls (people left almost completely non-sapient who are used as living tracking devices), and the atmosphere around the earth being replaced by an Alien Sky that cut off Earth from the rest of the universe.

NEEDLESS has a World War III level event causing a 'black spot'. Many of the people within this area have superhuman powers. Late in the anime, it's revealed that originally a Crystal Dragon Jesus Figure existed within the area and his death caused the powers to spread throughout the black spot.

Calumon from Digimon Tamers is something of a sentient version of this. It's hinted throughout the series that he's the power of digivolution incarnate, with reactions and shows of power from him whenever the Tamers' digimon needed to evolve. Calumon is then captured by one of the Digimon Sovereign, and after being rescued and his captor beat around by one of his peers (as well as the Tamers), he fully 'awakens' and summons an army of Digimon to warp them all to Mega-level in order to fight the D-Reaper.

In the Tiger & Bunny universe, people started developing or being born with many and varied superpowers about forty-five years before the time the show's set in. No one is quite sure why this happened — they just roll with it.

In Myriad Colors Phantom World, a Japanese company named Alayashiki was attacked by terrorists, releasing a brain-altering virus. This caused people to start seeing mythical creatures, like Youkai. A small percentage of children also developed special abilities.

Charlotte has the short-period comet Charlotte, which passes by Earth every 75 years and spreads dust particles across the planet small enough to be inhaled, which stimulates the development of superhuman powers in children once they hit puberty.

During the DC Comics crossover "Invasion!", the Dominators set off a "gene bomb" which activates a lot of people's dormant metagenes. Since the Dominators' aim was to get rid of Earth's super heroes, this was a textbook case of Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!.

Similarly, the White Event from the short-lived reboot Newuniversal, which explores the idea more. Here, rather than being random happenstance, it's a deliberate act by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, designed to help mankind through a "paradigm shift" as the planet enters a "strangematter web". Problem is, the choosing is at random. So the man given the Starbrand is drunk off his ass (sound familiar?), and the man give the Justice glyph is a brain-dead cop (who subsequently thinks he's in Hell). The setting also mentions a previous failed event, The Fireworks, which occurred back in the 60s, and only produced three superbeings, who were all killed within a decade. And there was another event several thousand years before, which did work... only one of the people empowered was an utter bastard who started killing and mind-raping the others for his own gain (and by the modern day, that event is completely lost to history).

The X-Men have the detonation of the Atom Bomb as the cause for the explosion in their birth rates, having been a very tiny percentage of the human population beforehand. They ain't called "The Children Of The Atom" for nothing.

In the Ultimate Marvel universe, mutants appeared in the world thanks to Super Soldier experiments performed on Wolverine, the first true mutant.

The setting of Earth X comes from this, but the reason is not revealed until later in the story. It turns out that it was Black Bolt, who used a weapon to cast Terrigen Mists down to Earth so that the Inhumans would not be seen as outcasts when they left Attilan. What he apparently didn't predict is for Earth to turn into such a Crapsack World.

The Terrigen Bomb from Marvel's Infinity event awakened the powers of every human carrying Inhuman genes. This became the setup for some new titles - for example, the new Ms Marvel.

In Malibu Comics' The Ultraverse, the only sources of superhuman powers were magic, technology ("wetware") or "the Jump Start" — an alien artifact located on the moon that every so often sent out bursts of energy that granted humans superpowers, at first theorized to be intended to advance humanity to the point where we could reach the moon and free it, but later revealed as attempts to gather its scattered components including the Nanomachines that had long ago infected all life on Earth including humans.

In another of his comics, Supreme Power, all superpowers (except Hyperion and Zarda's) were caused by a nanovirus that came to Earth along with Hyperion.

The Elementals comic by Bill Willingham had the Shadowspear, a mass of supernatural energy collected by Big Bad Saker to help him conquer the world; when Saker is defeated by the Elementals, the Shadowspear spell runs wild and becomes attracted to pain and death, causing various people and animals all over the world who have died in especially weird ways to be resurrected as supernatural beings, most of whom fought the Elementals.

What's more, an extremist religious group learns how the Shadowspear works and sacrifices hundreds of its followers in gruesome ways, trying to create their own superhumans. And it worked. The vast majority of these "martyrs" died, but enough were empowered to create the Rapture super-team.

In The End League, most superpowers are a result of the Green Event, wherein SupermanAstonishman was tricked by Lex LuthorDead Lexington into blowing up a crashed alien spaceship, releasing exotic radiation from the ship's power core. The radiation killed around 3 billion people but empowered several hundred thousand.

WildStorm Universe had several - the Comet Effect, Gen Factor, being a partially human from one of the alien races that masquaraded their way through Earth's history, whatever it was that created Century Babies, exposure to the Snowflake... that should about cover it.

Transformers: Generation 2: Redux (otherwise known as the comic book that was distributed at BotCon 2010) revolved around the Decepticons experimenting with forestonite. Eventually, an attempt to destroy it to keep it out of the Autobots' hands results instead in forestonite gas granting superpowers to all the Transformers present (along with the occasional new look).

In The Simpsons comic event "When Bongos Collide", every human in Springfield except Bart got hit with a nuclear blast caused by Itchy and Scratchy turned real. Not only did they gain diverse powers, but they started fighting each other for no particular reason. Bart observed, "With great power comes even greater irresponsibility!" In order to set things right, Bart dons his Bartman persona, and using Flanders' video camera, a comic book, and the same alien technology that made Itchy and Scratchy real, he teams up with Radioactive Man.

Captain Carrot and each original member of his amazing Zoo Crew gain their powers because of exposure to fragments from the same strange meteor.

Downplayed in Strontium Dog: Most characters in the series who have some form of superpowers got them due to Strontium-90 fallout from the Great War, but vanishingly few of those exposed to Strontium-90 came out physically or mentally superior to baseline humans.

DC Nation, in their version of Blackest Night, had hundreds of rings in every color of the emotional spectrum descend on Earth for the final fight. This included black ones.

The Nucleus Incident, a very popular Team Fortress 2 fanfic, involves the RED team being exposed to a blinding light the glowing machine in the center of the Nucleus map gives off one day. Each team member wakes up some time later to find out they've acquired strange superpowers and the BLU team have superpowers of their own.

In Poké Wars, Ho-oh uses the orb of creation to substantially boost the power of Pokémon attacks and make them lethal. In addition, Lugia uses his own orb of creation to remove the dampeners of humans, granting them the ability to perform superhuman physical feats.

My Little Avengers has three: the first happened in the distant past, when Asgard was destroyed, and the magic released by it created Celestia and Luna, as well as the first Unicorns and Pegasi. The second occurs when Celestia is forced to release most of her own magic when Loki attacks her; this causes random mutations across Equestria. The third occurs at the end of the story, when Loki dies, and his magic is released in the same way. According to him, this will insure that everypony (and every other species) will all be mutants within a few generations.

Downplayed in A Posse Ad Esse, a Die Anstalt fanfic in which the six playable toys get specialized superpowers. The energy wave coming out from Dr Wood only affects the toys inside the asylum at the time; in fact, not even that far, since Dub is found without any, being "furthest away from the blast".

The entire plot of the Detective Conan fanfic Midnight White starts with a mysterious stranger breaking into a science museum during a Kaito KID heist and setting off a device that produces a strange blue/white smoke when caught. The rest of the plot revolves around the main characters and a few OCs discovering and dealing with their powers and relationships, while trying to figure out what the mysterious stranger wanted.

Red Lightning has the Storm, which gave a significant minority in Peach Creek super powers.

The dramatic climax of A New World includes a downpour of dragon blood, which dramatically increases the power of youkai touched by it, and transformed humans soaked in it into youkai.

Superhumans begin to appear in the world of Equestria Girls in Equestria Girls The Empowered World after an explosion of Equestrian energy in Canterlot. The source of it is yet unknown, but it appears to have been caused by the formation of the Human World Elements of Harmony

Downplayed in the Oversaturated World. At the end of the first story, the whole world is infused with magic and every human has strange new mutations... but for the most part these mutations follow very similar patterns, with only a few individuals being more powerful than everyone else.

Film

In X-Men, Magneto's plan is to turn all the world leaders into mutants. Not only would it kill the leaders, but it also broke the mental barrier that sealed the Dark Phoenix within Jean Grey's psyche.

In All Superheroes Must Die this is hinted at for the reason that all of the heroes got their power except for Charge in the first place.

In The Amazing Spider-Man, The Lizard plans to make all humans into superpowered Reptilian Humanoids like him by releasing a chemical cloud from Oscorp's tower, to eliminate the weaknesses he believes plague humanity. Needless to say, Spider-Man stops him.

Literature

The Wild Cards book series has an alien virus that grants superpowers to about 1% of victims, while the other 99% either die horribly or become grotesque mutants. In 1946 it is released in the atmosphere over Manhattan, killing thousands and creating a few dozen supers. It's later revealed that a percentage of the seemingly uninfected are carriers when the virus manifests in their offspring.

In Philip José Farmer's "biographies" of Tarzan and Doc Savage (and the Massively Multiplayer Crossover "Wold Newton Universe" based on Phillip's stories), the Event is the titular Wold Newton meteorite. The radiation of the meteorite affected the passengers of a passing coach (and several animals in the area); their descendants were endowed with unusual strength, intelligence, and ambition, becoming the inspiration for many of the heroes and villains of fiction. (See the other wiki for more details.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie has 1001 children born at midnight on the day India gained its independence acquiring low-level superpowers and a telepathic network as a result.

In Scorpion Shards, the protagonists' superpowers are triggered by the supernova of a distant star. The shards of the star's soul enter the bodies of all six of the infants born at the exact moment of its destruction.

At the end of the series, billions of stars go supernova simultaneously, transforming the entire next generation of humanity into Star Shards in recognition of the Shards showing mercy on their enemies in the final battle.

In The Grimnoir Chronicles books, at some point before the American Civil War, people all over the world suddenly started gaining superpowers.

In Wearing the Cape, the Event changes the world as we know it. For 3.2 seconds everyone in the world experiences complete sensory deprivation, along with a worldwide power outage. Since the Event, a small percentage of people who experience great trauma or stress become "breakthroughs," manifesting superhuman powers. The cause of the Event and source of these powers is never explained.

Perry Rhodan explains the sudden turn up of mutants with radioactivity because of the A-Bomb.

In the Mistborn books, the only way for a potential Allomancer of any kind to unlock their abilities is to face a near-death experience, resulting in an event called "Snapping." Late in second book and all through the third one, the mist sickness is a deliberate attempt by Preservation to forcibly unlock the Allomancy inherent in the entire human population by deliberately push anyone who has inherent Allomantic powers to near-death.

Possible example in Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain. Evolution, one of the first heroes, spent the first week after he got his powers as a tree, trying to learn how to control everything. The massive amounts of pollen he released during that time spread across the globe, to the point that everyone on the planet has traces of his DNA in their system. It's theorized (in-universe) that this is the cause of the later surge in superhumans.

Lavie Tidhar's novel The Violent Century is a deconstruction of World War II Alternate History stories involving the existence of superpowered people (the superpowered people are too few in number and historical forces too gargantuan for history to be changed much if at all) in which all the great powers have superpeople by 1939 due to the effects of a quantum physics experiment in the mid-1930s by a Mad Scientist named Dr. Vomacht.

The titular Infection of TheInfected. An unexplained event that causes superpowers, and still is. It's not evolution, mutation, or a disease, though people thought it might be in the early days and tried quarantining Infected. Actually, there are at least a couple of "specific infectors" whose power is that they're contagious and spread powers around.

In Forging Hephaestus, there are occasional events called Confluences that result when a combination of unrelated factors result in the appearance of lots of newmetahumans. While metas can still appear outside of Confluences, those occasions are far less frequent. The first known Confluence involved a Freak Lab Accident, resulting in the laws of physics becoming far more malleable than before, thus allowing superpowers to be possible. Both the Alliance of Heroic Champions and the Guild of Villainous Reformation anticipate Confluences and scramble to snatch up new recruits and prevent collateral damage from people suddenly having powers. The book's protagonist, a Wreathed in Flames scientist named Tori Rivas is "recruited" into the Guild and becomes an apprentice to a retired villain. While she herself gained her powers outside of a Confluence, one happens not long after she joins the Guild.

In Twilight Watch, the book's villain wants to use a magical artifact to turn all humans in the world into Others, not realizing that it'll be total chaos with people settling scores and grudges with magic rather than the usual way. In Sixth Watch, a prophecy predicts the death of all Others in the world. It's explained that this will result in humans becoming Others to compensate with the same result as in Twilight Watch. Both events are averted, fortunately.

Live-Action TV

The eclipse in Heroes at least looked like one of these at first, but it's not completely clear. The eclipse didn't grant everyone's powers, certainly not all at once, but it did remove everybody's powers once.

The series has arguably had three mass super-empowering events, the first being the infusion of the initial 4400 returnees with promicin. Many non-returnees later get powers when well-intentioned extremists make promicin shots available to the public. The series ends with thousands of people in Seattle, including almost all of the remaining protagonists, getting powers as a result of the Power Incontinence of a character with the ability to release promicin into the atmosphere.

Buffy the Vampire Slayerends with a mass super-empowering event, with Willow using the power of the Slayer Scythe to make all the Potential Slayers around the world into full Slayers.

Of course, this doesn't include powers granted through magic, and an episode of Arrow season 3 also revealed that metahumans exist who were nowhere near Central City at the time of the accelerator explosion. The most recent season also gives Team Arrow its own meta, who happened to be in Central City during the event.

Then along comes Legends of Tomorrow, revealing that metahumans have been around since at least The '40s (e.g. some members of the Justice Society of America). Then there are people affected by Nth metal (an alien substance from planet Thanagar), such as Vandal Savage, Hawkman, and Hawkgirl. Some are never expalined, such as the Pilgrim's ability to freeze and reverse time locally.

Season four of The Flash opens with a smaller-scale version. When Barry gets pulled out of the Speed Force, he emerges in the path of a bus, and the energy released turns everyone on board into a metahuman.

The Season 2 finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ends with a crate full of Terrigen crystals that fell into the ocean earlier in the episode dissolving in the water. A bunch of fish are seen swimming through the cloud of dissolved crystal, which are then caught and made into fish oil capsules sold in stores all over the world, waiting to give superpowers to anyone with Inhuman ancestry. The Season 3 premiere later gives an estimate that the Terrigen will spread throughout the entire ocean in a year and a half.

This is the Origin Story of the title entities of the Ultra Series. They originated as beings similar to humans, but their sun began to die. So they built the Plasma Spark to act as their artificial sun to survive. This had the side effect of mutating the entire species into gigantic Energy Beings of immense power.

Kamen Rider Wizard: All of the Phantoms in the show are the result of a singular event, a dark ritual called the Sabbat that killed many people and released the Phantoms that existed within their psyches. This also serves as Wizard's origin; Haruto was present at the Sabbat, but fought back from the Despair Event Horizon, gaining access to his Phantom's magical power in the process. Later on the show introduces characters who got powers independent of the Sabbat, like Beast, who found an artifact Transformation Trinket with a Phantom sealed inside of it.

Tabletop Games

The Hellstorms in GURPS Technomancer, which generated a wave of magical radiation which imbued magical abilities in hundreds of thousands of people in the fallout zone.

In the Pulp Action game Adventure!, which is a prequel to Aberrant, the Hammersmith Incident released waves of "telluric energy" across the globe, allowing for the appearance of low powered individuals to appear (and laying the seeds for the later explosion of Novas).

Godlike, a supers Tabletop RPG set in World War II, posits the appearance of superpowered "Talents" starting in 1936. Talents may believe they got their powers from magical artifacts or radioactive spiders or alien rays, but all are psychics with the power to warp reality to their will. Because they all share the same origin, all Talents can detect other Talent powers in use, and can attempt to interfere with other Talents in a contest of wills.

Progenitor, another Wild Talents setting, subverts the Mass Super-Powering Event by having it empower only one person, and only become a mass event when it turns off superpowers are contagious, so every use of powers on someone has a chance of giving them powers (albeit, slightly weaker). Then those people pass on more (slightly weaker powers), often on enemies they use their powers to stop, and before you know it there are thousands to millions of superpowered individuals (though there is a limit to how many people each person can spread powers to, and that limit decreases to nothing after ten 'generations', so it's not like everyone will get powers).

The 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook suggested a number of possible ways to Retcon in psionics; this was one of them, although not necessarily the Far Realm specifically.

In the Forgotten Realms campaign setting a battle between two deities resulted in the genesis of magic in that world.

2nd Edition had the Ravenloft module Requiem, where the central event renders everyone in a small city — including the player characters — undead.

Champions The New Millenium had the Wildstrike, in which millions of people around the world developed superpowers at once. In a subversion, these powers often came with horrific drawbacks or were very weak.

Exalted has a variation: the titular Exalted have always been a part of the setting, but after the breaking of the Jade Prison, Solars began reappearing in numbers unheard of since the Usurpation, and the brand-new Abyssal and Infernal Exalted showed up as well.

Also expressed in the origins of the Exalted, as the Exaltations were created by the gods to imbue their chosen mortal champions with the power to defeat the Primordials. They might have different flavors, but all have the same original reason for existing.

At least until 3e: the Liminals didn't show up until the Shogunate, and the Exigents are created on a case-by-case basis - some may well be results of the Primordial War, but others are created afterwards (e.g., the example Chosen of Harvests is a present-day creation).

In the Freedom Force games, when Mentor's ship is destroyed in Earth's orbit by Lord Dominion's forces, his supply of Energy X (the most powerful substance in the universe!), rains down all over Earth, empowering many heroes and villains.

This was actually Lord Dominion's plan for Earth all along, except he only planned to give Energy X to criminals, then sit back and watch humans destroy each other.

In Vagrant Story, simply being within the city of Lea Monde begins to gift you with magical powers and extra senses. The same goes for your enemies, and even the Damsel in Distress, who gains the ability to see the hidden thoughts of the guys capturing her. The extra-sensory perception comes in handy for Ashley Riot to see cutscenes involving the villains when the villains are nowhere near him.

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader had a cataclysmic magical explosion known as the Disjunction during the crusades. Many people were possessed by spirits this time which granted them magical powers, though such possessed people are shunned and distrusted by normals.

City of Heroes has a grand total of three Events (with the tie-in books, technically five, as the first spawned beings who became the Titans, and another generation who became the Greek gods), two playing it straight and one inverting. The first is Marcus Cole and Stefan Richter drinking from the Well Of Furies, which supposedly opened the Pandora's Box on superpowers of all origins. Similar to the X-Men example above, mutants began appearing with more frequency after the first atom bomb was detonated. Finally, the Event was inverted at the beginning of the comics series when Lord Recluse (alias Stefan Richter) depowered all of Paragon City's extremely numerous heroes. Tying into this is the Event that re-powered all the heroes, the unleashing of Prometheus's Flame.

In Mass Effect, an explosion at a Singapore spaceport in 2150 caused Element Zero to be spread across a wide area, affecting many unborn humans exposed to it. If you were lucky, nothing happened. If you were unlucky, you died from radiation poisoning. And if you were extremely lucky, you got biotic powers. Kaidan, a biotic caused by the Singapore incident, also mentions that several other such incidents occurred over the next few years. While there's never been any proof they weren't genuine industrial accidents, it's very interesting how they never seemed to happen in unpopulated areas...

DC Universe Online has something like this. Lex Luthor comes from the future where he killed the Justice League, only for Brainiac to show up and ruin his party. So he goes back in time to give large numbers of people superpowers to stop his past-self's plans AND Brainiac. The Exobytes contain data on all of Earth's heroes and villains, and are released into the atmosphere infecting random people who can be either good or evil depending on their personality before being infected.

"You there! Have you seen my son go by? He's infected with a terrible virus that will kill one third of the earth's population, making five eights of those remaining lactose intolerant and while granting amazing superpowers to a quarter of the remainder!" ... "Well, come on then, either you've seen him or you haven't." "Wait, no, start over. I was always bad at math."

For those interested, approx. 7.5 billion people in the world (as of October 2017 estimates), that would be roughly 469 million individuals with amazing superpowers or about 1-in-11 people (granted that's after 1-in-3 people have died).

A much smaller-scale version than usual happened in Knowledge Is Power; a Negative Space Wedgie opened up in a cafeteria-type-area on a college campus and granted superpowers to the eight humans currently in it, with the nature of the powers being based on what they were thinking about—their homework.

In Phaeton whenever a nuclear bomb goes off or a public experiment is carried out either this will happen or eveyone will die.

Worm's Endbringers usually cause such events whenever they attack major cities. Justified because extreme trauma is the most common cause of superpowers in the Wormverse.

Scion, the world's first superhero, first appeared floating over the Atlantic in May 1982. After this, people began developing powers, but did not reveal their existence to the public until 1987.

Western Animation

The Big Bang from Static Shock (and from the original Milestone Comics line that inspired it): the experimental "radioactive tracer gas" that police used during an apocalyptically large gang war left many of those exposed to it (participants and bystanders) with superpowers. Of course, some of these powers were not beneficial, and some characters likely died as a result. It is notable that the number of empowered characters is much lower than the number of people implied to be at the Big Bang.

The Nanite Event from Generator Rex. Five years ago, there was an explosion in a research facility, and nanomachines infected every living thing on Earth. Every so often, the nanomachines turn something into a mutant, usually mindless and aggressive. And it's not just humans—animals and plants can be mutated, too.

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